RR Companions Vault v5.1 Upcoming, Part III

Okay, so I promised screenshots yesterday morning.

It's now today morning, and I'm just getting around to it.

Not a total slacker - there were a couple hitches in the works. Had a navmeshing error in the new areas, and some AI problems with Chloe's guards. Between fixing them, and venturing into the evil place that uses a smiley face as its mascot, my night was pretty shot to shit.

Still, this morning I got the last of the problems lined out, and the code tested. Believe it or not, setting up a recruitable merchant and her guards is a bit of work. Still some fine-tuning to do... but it's basically done.

And now, for the promised previews:



Here you see three of the new tunnel guards, having their evening meal. Packages are currently set to have the guards remove their hats when going off duty. Also currently set to be three on/three off at any given time. This was easier on me from a package creation standpoint, but it leads to the guards bunching up at patrol points quite a bit. May have to break down and do a third set of packages, to have them go two/two/two; eight on sixteen off. Standard three shift rotation usually works best anyway.




One of the tunnel guards, relaxing with one of Chloe's guards in their smaller-but-still-nice guard room. I've left the sandbox packages fairly loose, resulting in seeing the two sets of guards mingle in amusing ways.




Here we see Chloe, herself, looking very classy. She's easy to find when working, as she stays behind the desk there. Her inventory is... extensive. A level 20 projection from within the GECk placed her inventory value at over 123k caps. She carries a large selection of armor and weapons, a ton of ammunition, bobbypins and scrap metal, some meds, and a full collection of weapon schematics, as well has having over a hundred thousand caps for buying. Best of all, her inventory respawns regularly, resetting the inordinate amount of caps, as well as spawning new random items for the inventory.

You can't see it in the shot, but she also wears and sells a creation of mine from another mod that I never released: a customized scoped .44 magnum revolver. No heavy-duty mods, just upped the accuracy, increased the scope to 6x, and set it to never jam on reload. Think of it like a S&W PC piece. Price has been increased accordingly, and it does NOT replace any vanilla item.




Wider shot of Chloe's shop. You'll see she redecorated quite a bit; throwing down flooring, changing out the lights, and putting in amenities. I haven't cluttered the shop yet, but you have a basic idea of the layout, at least.




Shot I surreptitiously snapped of Chloe while she was asleep. Lighting looked better in-game. Still, it lets you see part of her attached bedroom.

I'm pretty happy with how 5.1 is turning out, I have to say. The two sets of guards mingle when off duty, eat together, and can often be spied chatting when the patrolling guards' path intersects the shop.

Chloe, being the aloof "boss", eats by herself, at a private table in her room.

Still fighting a bit with the shower packages. The game doesn't like forcing an NPC to use an idle marker, and so often has them just standing in the shower room naked. Annoyances.

Thus far, the already-released 20thCW supply system plugin works perfectly with Chloe's inventory, and her guards. Saw one of the guards packing a suppressed P90 from v4 of 20thCW. Her inventory is also set up to sell components for CRAFT reloading, though I'll have to add a separate plugin to get her to sell the ammo schematics.

On the whole, many people will probably consider Chloe a cheat vendor. While her stuff isn't free by any means, she does carry a huge amount of stuff, much of which was previously difficult to acquire. She has enough caps to handle most any stockpile of stuff to sell, too.

But, as Sgt Ovakil pointed out a couple weeks ago, there really isn't a high-level merchant in the game. You might be able to unload twenty grand worth of stuff, if you track down all the caravans, and have them maxed out on investments... but I know I've got more than that just in my "save it for repair parts later" weapons stash. To say nothing of my stock of looted power armors... and my character is only level 18.